What starts off as a simple anime that looks like a fairy tale with a young girl who can talk to fairies turns out to be a comedic, yet dark look at dystopian future for mankind. No wonder the title translates to "Humanity Has Declined", something I didn't know going into such a cheerful looking anime.
Watashi, our heroine starts off by looking different than her long haired-self in the opening theme song and is slightly depressed by the lack of food. She seems to beloved by the fellow girls in town, a town that looks like it's out of a fairy tale. She is suddenly called the UN Representative, am I missing something? After being praised so much by her fan club trio she is ordered to kill some chickens that escape, because she simply never killed any chicken neither did any of the girls in town. After showing a slightly more sinister side to her mind on telling her fan club not to tell anyone. We find her confessing to fairies about her plight.
Yes, cute little people that help make things, except they're the next generation of humans. Watashi believes humans are near extinction and the fairy tale world was brought about by some cataclysm unmentioned. This is the start of the first episode of Humanity Has Declined. The next episode goes further with bizarre plots of canned goods arriving in town for the hungry townsfolk to eat with much stranger reasons you'd expect as how the food got there. Predictable seems to not be on this shows plate.
It's a hard balance, but Humanity Has Declined has pulled of a dark comedy in a very light way. Almost like a sci-fi 70's movie that has no problems. Watashi says some very sorrow filled things as well as insight into human nature and bureaucracy. Then there's some strange and ideas that work when they shouldn't such as a video camera that when you takes pictures with makes a gunshot noise to make sure it can be used perversely. Then the way people talk with both ignorance and intelligence as they live in a time where human achievement is over an only survival exist, yet bureaucracy remains. Mix in that for a dystopian future it looks rather nice where Watashi and the elves live.
You can watch it simulcast on Crunchyroll and Sentai Filmworks has bought the license, so digital distrubtion will be around in other forms and a home video release in 2013.
